A senior doctor from Nair hospital has filed a writ petition against the Maharashtra Public Service Commission at Bombay High Court over the dean recruitment process at BMC-run hospitals.
Dr Shailesh Mohite, Professor and Head of Forensic Science department at Nair hospital, has filed a writ petition at Bombay high court on January 24 against Maharashtra Public Service Commission's (MPSC) procedures of recruitment of deans for hospitals run by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) .
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The petition demands that MPSC should follow Medical Council of India (MCI) guidelines during the recruitment of deans at BMC-run hospitals.
He has alleged that there are irregularities in the selection process of the hospital deans by MPSC and that the currently short-listed candidates do not meet the basic criteria.
MPSC uploaded the list of 4 admitted candidates on January 19, 2013. Dr Mohite claims that out of the 16 applicants only 4 were selected and the rest were rejected. Out of the 12 rejected 5 were not eligible as per advertisement (by MPSC) and 7 were not eligible as per the criteria.
Dr Mohite said, “In 2005 & 2008, when Dr Sanjay Oak & Dr Sandhya Kamath respectively were interviewed & selected by MPSC, 8 candidates were interviewed for a single post of Dean. This year when there are two vacant posts of Dean why not call all the 11 applicants who were eligible as per the advertisement for the interview?”
He added, “Dr RR Shinde & Dr RR Satoskar who have applied this year, have appeared for interviews for the dean’s post on previous two occasions. If they met the criteria previously why were they not short-listed this year?”
For open category candidates, MPSC initially had proposed minimum criteria as PG degree + MCh or DNB Postgraduate degree & 27 yrs experience with minimum 12 yrs experience as professor or PG degree & 32 yrs experience of which 20 yrs experience as professor.
Following these criteria they shortlisted Dr Ramesh Bharmal (ST category), Dr Chandra Bathija (now Dr Mamta Mangalani, Professor and Head, Dept of Paediatrics, Sion hospital), Dr Hemant Kumar Savant (Dept of Neurosurgery, Nair hospital) and Dr Avinash Supe (Dept of gastrointestinal surgery, KEM hospital).
However, on January 23, MPSC announced that after verifying the documents, Dr Suleiman Merchant (Acting Dean and Head department of Radiology, Sion hospital) is also being invited for the interview for dean’s post.
Dr Mohite alleges that MPSC criteria exclude non-BMC medical teachers by raising the criteria to 32 years because to gain 32 years experience (as associate professor and professor) one will have to obtain the PG degree (MD/ MS) at age of 18 years.
Talking to MiD DAY, Chandrashekar Pawar, Under-secretary, MPSC said, “The allegations about irregularities in our selection process are completely wrong and baseless. We have thoroughly verified the documents of the selected candidates before short-listing them. We also reduced the years of experience of doctors holding PG degree to 30 years on January 23.”
He added, “Due to an error on our side we had miscalculated the overall experience of Dr Manglani as 32 years but during the verification we realized that she only had 28 years of experience. Hence we had to disqualify her and select Dr Merchant as the next eligible candidate with an experience of 30 years. We had informed Dr Manglani over the phone that she had been disqualified. However on January 28 she was present for the interview where we gave her a written explanation as to why she had not qualified.” u00a0
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